What I am wanting to do is share something special with all of you that happened to me yesterday while I was in the top end of Australia in a lovely town called Darwin.

Today I stood in the footsteps of my Father Cpl James F Ryan of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) at the site he photographed in 1942 during and after the Japanese bombing of Darwin.

This is the first time I have stood in a place my father did fighting for his country, when he was just a boy of 17 himself, who was there and experianced the bombing as it happened. To say it was a miricle he survived is an understaement, but he was a tough old fellow!

i still have the box brownie he took the below pics with, plus about 200 photographs of his travels during WWII

I cant believe how emotional I got standing here taking these pictures.

Below is an image off the net, which I will substitute for a scan of his original images when I get back to Sydney on Friday.

I hope all my friends here dont mind me sharing this experiance with them, and i can only imagine the horror that my dad, and all the others that were in Darwin experianced on the day.

Below is some words I also want to share, that may not be to familiar to some of you not aware of what happened here in 1942.

This was the only building not to be knocked down after the Bombing as the town was quite devastated.

What I didn’t know was that the same fleet of Japanese aircraft carriers responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbour carried out the raids on Darwin.

During the 2 raids (or waves) on February 19th on the same day twice as many bombs were dropped on Darwin as there were at Pearl Harbour

The first wave consisted of 188 Japanese aircraft and was aimed mainly at the port of Darwin and the city centre (which is about where the bank is located)

The second wave consisted of 54 bombers which happened to hours later at 11:00am and was concentrated on Darwin RAAF base.

During these 2 waves 292 people were killed and many hundreds more were wounded, and 13 ships were sunk.

It must have been pretty devastating for this small town, which to me does not look much different to dads photos.

I also didn’t know that Darwin was bombed a further 61 times by the Japanese up until November 1943